Part 5
Pearl came in the early hours of Friday. Julia never heard her enter the yard. The Bennetts’ dog did not bark once. Later she often wondered how Pearl had managed that, but she never found out.
A face framed by a low-tied scarf simply appeared in the window above the dark garden. Julia pulled herself up on her arms and opened it.
“Pearl—”
“Quiet. How are the legs?”
“I can stand. I walk along the wall at night.”
The woman outside was silent for a full minute.
“Then there it is.”
“Please tell me straight. What could it be? What is she giving me?”
“I can’t give you a name. I’m no pharmacist, and I won’t pretend. What I could see was your eyes. You looked drugged, and you hadn’t been drinking. Your mouth was dry. Your skin was dry as paper. That leg didn’t look like what I’ve seen when the nerves are gone. Thin, yes, but not wasted the same way.”
“Who’s going to believe me?”
“Nobody,” Pearl said. “Not while all you have is my word. You believe me, but you haven’t got anything to show anyone else.”
“What do I do?”
“Three things. First, don’t swallow any more of it, but don’t push yourself too hard either. You can’t whip that body into working. It’s been shut away for years.”
She paused.
“Second. Did you keep the braid they cut off?”
“It’s in my grandmother’s trunk.”
“Leave it alone. Don’t wash it again, don’t brush it. Let it stay where it is. There’ll come a day it can speak for you.”
“How can hair speak?”
“How does a tree tell you how old it is, or which summers were hard? It keeps a record. Hair grows out instead of laying down rings, but it can keep traces too. Find someone with the learning to read what’s there.”
Julia gripped the windowsill.
“What’s the third thing?”
“Find the bottle. Not the one she pours your drops from. She carries that in her pocket. Find what she fills it from. I’d look somewhere cool. Whatever she’s keeping, she won’t want it spoiled by heat.”
From the Bennetts’ porch to her grandmother’s property was a little over a hundred paces, along a path through two gardens. In daylight it was nothing. Sometimes in summer they wheeled Julia over to sit beside the old house, and the chair rolled easily across the packed earth. The path dipped sharply near the cellar. Someone always had to help her there.
At night those hundred paces stretched as far as a lifetime.
She left after two in the morning, when the household slept most deeply. She slid from the bed onto the floor so the frame would not creak, then crawled to the back porch, dragging her rubber slides behind her. There she stood, holding the doorframe.
Outside it was cold. August nights emptied the valley of its daytime heat. The air off the river felt as if a slab of ice lay nearby. The sky was black and full of stars all the way to its edges. The Milky Way hung above the jagged mountains.
She started walking.
For the first ten steps she held the fence. Then the fence ended, leaving open garden between the potato rows.
She took four steps and fell.
The soft potato vines spared her any real hurt, but there was nothing to grip, and she could not get up. At last she rose the way a newborn calf does: onto her knees first, then one foot placed beneath her, then the other, and finally upright, swaying.
She fell three more times.
She never knew how long the journey took. She remembered the sharp, green smell of crushed potato vines and a night bird calling beyond the village. Near the end she crawled down the slope toward the cellar door, clutching handfuls of grass.
The door had a wooden turn latch. She opened it and crawled inside.
The old smell met her, sweet, nutty, damp.
She was home.
Her great-grandfather’s stonework made a low vault overhead. The cellar ran a good thirty feet into the hillside. Old things were kept at the far end, where the temperature varied least. Near the door stood Lydia’s operation: the grant-funded stainless steel vat, painted wooden shelving, rows of wrapped wheels.
Julia reached the switch. A dim yellow bulb lit beneath the arch.
The ledger was still on the shelf by the door. Its oilcloth cover had faded, and mold ran along the spine. She took it and held it against her chest with both arms, standing without moving.
Then she made her way to the far end.
Beyond the whey barrels was a recess in the stone wall. Her great-grandfather had left it for ice, hauled from the river before electricity reached the house. Now it held things that needed to stay cool: starter in glass jars, two jugs of vinegar, a box of veterinary odds and ends, and a cookie tin.
Julia had known that tin since childhood. Her grandmother had kept buttons in it.
She sat on the earth floor, put it in her lap, and lifted the lid.
Inside were three screw-top bottles of dark glass, two partly used and one full. One was small, like a pharmacy bottle. The other two carried labels with a long drug name. Beneath it, in small print, were words that made her hands turn cold.
For veterinary use. For the immobilization of large animals. Store in a cool place, protected from light.
There was an inventory stamp from the large-animal clinic across the pass, where Lydia had worked for more than twenty years.
Beneath the bottles lay a little homemade notebook, folded into quarters and stitched together with thread. Julia opened it.
Dates ran down the pages, month after month, for three years. Beside them were neat figures and brief notes, written for the writer alone.
Too much. Too little. Sluggish. Walking along the wall. Fell on the porch. Asked about the land.
In the middle was a two-week gap. Across the blank space, on a slant, Lydia had written one word.
Spokane.
Julia sat on the cold earth in her grandmother’s cellar after two in the morning, holding three years of her life.
She did not cry. Everything became still and clear, the way every branch shows when a blizzard finally stops.
She put the bottles back, closed the tin, and returned it to exactly the same place, facing the same way. She laid the little notebook back as she had found it. She took none of it.
She took only her ledger and crawled out into the black garden beneath the stars, holding the oilcloth book against her chest.
For three nights she read under the blankets with a flashlight borrowed without permission from Sam.
She was reading her own handwriting. At first it was round and even. Later it grew crooked, slipping off the lines. Near the end, she could scarcely make it out herself.
Five and three-quarter gallons. Upper meadow good. Bluebells finished. Started four wheels.
Dizzy by the cellar. Sat on the ground. Spilled whey. Ridiculous.
Started the tonic. Bitter. Makes my tongue feel tight.
Three days in a fog. Counted the gallons four times. Got a different number each time.
Can’t feel the floor with my feet.
Derek brought papers. Signed them. Don’t remember what.
Lydia making cheese without me. Cutting the curds too large. That’s why the wheels weep.
Couldn’t get up today.
After that, nearly blank pages, with an occasional entry of two or three words. The last one was dated a month before the wheelchair became permanent.
God, what is happening to me?
In the dark, Julia understood what she had. Nobody could invent this record afterward: the pasture, the milk, the weather, and, threaded through the ordinary days, a body losing the ability to walk, written as it happened by a hand growing weaker on the page.
Two nights later she went into the Bennetts’ bedroom.
An armoire stood there, with a blue elastic-closure folder on top. Julia knew that folder. They had brought it to her ever since she became ill, then put it away again.
She climbed onto a stool. It was madness to stand at night on a stool when her legs could scarcely hold her for a minute. She clung to the armoire door and breathed through her mouth.
The folder was heavy. She lowered herself to the floor between the bed and the wall, turned on Sam’s phone, and began photographing the pages.
First came the grant agreement. She had signed that herself, with a healthy hand. The business had to keep operating for five years, use the funds only for approved purposes, and report every year, or the agency could take the money back. The person responsible was the owner.
She was the owner.
Then the loan agreement, dated the first fall she had been ill. Borrower: Julia Bennett. Amount: $85,000.
The signature was hers, the flourish her grandmother had taught her. But the letters sloped, and the final loop wandered down and away, as though someone else had been steadying her hand.
She remembered the cactus in the teacup. Nothing more.
Under it was a deed of trust. Her property on River Road had been pledged as security: her grandmother’s house and all the land beneath it, including the hillside that held the cellar.
Then bank letters, polite at first, later not. Missed payments. A demand for the entire balance. A warning that the bank would foreclose.
Then a power of attorney, notarized in Millbridge the previous spring, naming Lydia Bennett to act for her.
Then a purchase agreement. Seller: Julia Bennett, acting through her attorney-in-fact. Buyer: Robert Whitman. Property: the River Road parcel. An earnest-money deposit had been paid in May. If the sale failed through the seller’s default, the deposit would be returned and the buyer’s documented expenses reimbursed, up to the amount of the deposit again.
Clipped behind it was a letter from a title company in Missoula. Given the seller’s documented medical condition, it said, the company could not rely on the power of attorney to insure the transfer. It suggested the family obtain a court-appointed conservator.
Last came a document printed on good paper with wide margins.
Petition for appointment of a guardian and conservator.
Petitioner: Lydia Bennett. Proposed protected person: Julia Bennett.
Neat lines described a severe neurological illness. Julia could not rise, could not care for herself, did not understand her actions, confused dates, could not manage property, and needed someone appointed to make decisions for her.
At the bottom, in pencil, someone had written: Hearing September 30. Request examination at home in advance.
Julia photographed the last page, turned off the phone, and sat in darkness.
She could see the whole thing now, as clearly as a valley seen from a pass.
They had put the business in her name, taken money in her name, then borrowed against the only thing her grandmother had left her. They had stopped paying. Now they wanted to sell the land for a vacation lodge, and the paper they had made her sign was not enough. They needed a judge to say she was no longer a person.
Everything fit.
One question remained, and Julia could not turn away from it.
What would happen to the owner after the land was sold and the debts were paid, while the person controlling her remained in control?
She looked toward the dark window. For the first time in those weeks, she thought of her own death as something settled and scheduled, like the hearing on September 30…
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